Tuesday, 8 May 2012

The Final Four

On to the fourth post on factors that affect maximum energy. When I wrote the first post I expected to say that these factors wouldn't have much of an impact, but since then I've had some in game experience that has shown at least one of them to be potentially a big deal.

The last batch of factors that are affected by maximum energy are:

Maximum energy from meditating

Maximum food you can eat in a day

More efficient AL runs

Avoid overfilling from icon reveres / ruminates

Let's tackle them all, then go back to examples.

Meditating

Your maximum daily energy from meditating with all upgrades is 150% of your energy tank. At some point I was ready to write this off. After all, with 1000 energy that gives 1500 energy from meditating. At 2 energy per second meditating and assuming you are meditating half the time while crafting, that's 1500 seconds of crafting to reach your daily limit. 25 minutes of crafting seemed like a lot.

But it had been a long time since I was really playing the game to earn xp. With imagination in the picture I find that I easily spend 25 minutes crafting on many days, and that Zen debuff was starting to show up regularly.

Whether or not increasing your maximum energy will net your energy from meditation depends on how much you craft. If you like to meditate while not crafting you'll have to factor that in as well, but while that may be your play style, it is not an efficient use of in-game time (I analyze efficient use only because you can't analyze personal preference, not because personal preference is worse than efficiency - I would support the position that it is actually better). Basically every minute you craft during the day increases the maximum energy tank you can utilized by meditating by 40. If you craft for an hour then every energy up to 2400 is giving you an additional 1.5 energy per day from meditation. If you craft for two hours than up to 4800 energy is effective in this way. Of course two hours of crafting is an awful lot to average, and for many of us we don't spend a long time crafting every game day but may do so every other game day, or simply some game days. If you craft for an hour every other day but do very little crafting on your non-crafting days then every maximum energy up to 2400 is worth 0.75 energy per day. Note this is very different than if you craft for half an hour every day - it's the same amount of total crafting but it means that you can only utilize 1200 energy for meditating purposes, but also halves the per day value of your maximum energy tank from meditating.

Stuffed

Many glitchen are unaware that there is a food maximum, but it's there. I hit it a few times myself while leveling up to 60 the first time, and got close to it while testing if levitation counted toward the meditation badges on a level 8 glitch, but other than that it hasn't affected me. I'd imagine that many glitchen have never come close to it. The cap on food eaten is approximately 20 times you maximum energy. With any reasonably sized energy pool this simply isn't going to be an issue, but if you have a very small energy pool, like 100, it could be argued that every maximum energy you gain increases your daily energy by 20 since it allows you to eat more. Of course this depends entirely on whether you eat for energy or not.

Ancestral Lands

It's no longer a trade secret that one way to fill up your energy is to teleport to the ancestral lands, run around and get high value quoins until you are full and then leave. If you are teleporting there are back then you need to spend 20% of your maximum energy on that, and you can't show up dead, so we'll set aside another 5% that you have to arrive with. That means that each trip to the ancestral lands has the potential for about a 75% energy refill.

Because of this, if you are making one trip per day you could count maximum energy as an additional 0.75 energy per day, at two trips you could count it as 1.5 additional energy per day. That, however, is overly optimistic.

There are two things dampening the effect of the ancestral lands. First, you are actually using quoins towards your quoin limit. Ancestral quoins average a value of 13 while quoins in the majority of the world average a value of 1, that means that every ancestral lands quoin you pick up is only giving you 12 more than you could have had without going to the ancestral lands, not 13 more. Also, the quoins you pick up have to pay for the teleportation cost, so you have to pick up 95% of your energy value in quoins to get 75%, but picking up that 95% costs you 7.3% that you could have picked up in regular quoins, so really you benefit 67.7%. Of course make sure not to double count the teleportation. If you are already adding in the cost of the extra teleports to your basic calculation of the value of maximum energy then use 87.7% instead.

It could further be argued that energy quoins are not efficient quoins to collect because you could be collecting imagination quoins. Imagination, as discussed while talking about mood, is regularly purchased by many glitchen at about 1.37 energy per imagination. Since imagination quoins give 20% more than other quoins with a full mood bonus, an energy quoin is effectively worth only 61% of an imagination quoin. I'm leaving this out of my calculation, however, because while we are willing to pay a high price for imagination, when we collect energy we are usually converting it to imagination at a much better rate - nibbling pigs to get 6 imagination for 1 energy or crafting at 3 or 4 to 1. We donate for imagination essentially because it takes no time, not because it is efficient.

The second thing limiting the value of ancestral runs is that they actually take time. If more people are doing them then they take longer because it is harder to find quoins. I might make a more detailed post about time in the ancestral lands another day, but preliminary calculations suggest that your time there will spend anyway. Between swag from dust traps and high value currant and imagination quoins, you would want to go to the ancestral lands even if it didn't refill your energy, so spending more time there is not a problem.

So each time you teleport in and out of the ancestral and and fill your energy tank to full you are gaining energy equal to around 0.68 for each energy in your maximum energy tank. This is only, however, if you actually fill up and then leave. Given competition in the ancestral lands at current levels, I'd say finding one energy quoin a minute is pretty reasonable, which would mean you can fill up if your quoin multiplier is at least 0.73% of your maximum energy. With a quoin multiplier of 11 you can benefit from around 1500 maximum energy in this way. With a quoin multiplier of 35 you can benefit from nearly 4800 maximum energy.

Icon Reveres

I make no secret of how much I love icons, but avoiding overfilling from icon reveres isn't a very good case for maximum energy. The value returned by icons when you revere them is highly variable, so it's possible to overfill and waste energy when you revere. At level 40 your tithe value would be 781, which means your average revere would be 340, but your reveres would go as high as about 781. If the revere was the first after a tithe then it would be 50% larger, so up to nearly 1200 energy.

With less than around 1200 energy you'll see occasional waste of small amount of energy at high level with reveres that happen immediately after tithes. With 1500 you'll see almost none, with 2000 you won't get any. I don't think this is an important concern for sensible energy levels.

Examples

Here we had two factors that were important to the value of maximum energy, meditating which depends largely on how much you craft and the ancestral lands.

So we'll go back to our previous sample glitch who plays about 2 hours per game day (excluding morning gardening which is not relevant) and teleports an average of 2 times. We'll add in one more average teleport because about every other game day this glitch teleports to the ancestral lands and back. They don't do this specifically to fill up on energy, but simply because they like wandering around there and seeing what they get. Filling up their energy tank is a consequence, however, as their quoin multiplier is 12. They also craft every other day for about 30 minutes on average.

This glitch can get the meditation benefit from energy up to 1440 energy. They can get the benefit from the ancestral lands up to around 1640 energy. So any energy they buy up to 1440 increases the daily energy they have to spend by 0.06 (basic calculation from hours played and teleports) plus 0.75 (increasing meditation limit every other day) plus 0.44 (ancestral lands refill with teleports already paid for every other day). Each maximum energy is worth 1.25 energy per day. Above 1440 this drops to 0.5 energy per day. Above 1640 they gain only 0.06 energy per day per maximum energy unless they either start crafting and thus meditating more, or they increase their quoin multiplier to better utilize the ancestral lands.

Next time I'll make one final post about energy maximums that sums up what I've written and give practical examples of how to use this information to make decisions about your glitch.

About Me

Everything all together makes some sense to me, but it is very hard to communicate that sense by talking about any individual thing. At least I think that to myself. Most of the time I assume that people impart familiar meanings to the words I use and that the real message I wanted to convey is hopelessly lost. It is my fault for choosing prose rather than poetry or direct brain link-ups to explain myself.